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The Channelopathist has left the building – here are our top ten posts of the last two years

We’re moving. This will be the final post on the Channelopathist blog – we will change our platform this week and from Monday onwards, you will be redirected to our new blog. Let me tell you what is behind this move, and then let’s review our top ten posts of the last two years.

Housekeeping notes. The blog runs on the WordPress platform, which comes in two different flavors – wordpress.com and wordpress.org. WordPress.com is a commercial provider, which allows you to run your blog for free, but is limited with respect to extensions and flexibility. As our blog has grown over the last two years, we decided to use wordpress.org, a free system that can be independently hosted, can be equipped with various extensions and features and is very flexible. In the beginning, the new blog will be a little rough around the edges as we are still trying to figure out what features to use – but eventually we will have more freedom to design the blog the way we want. You can already get a first glimpse of the new blog here.

Stay updated. Speaking about rough edges – as of Monday, our email updates through WordPress.com will be discontinued. We will, however, continue our weekly email newsletter on epilepsy genetics. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do it here.

ILAE GC. Our current move also marks the transition from EuroEPINOMICS to ILAE that we have already indicated in various earlier posts. As of next Monday, Beyond the Ion Channel will be the official blog of the ILAE Genetics Commission. Also, the blog won’t be called “The Channelopathist” anymore. We felt that this term is dated and no longer appropriate for the shifting scenery in epilepsy genetics (even though we keep finding ion channels). We’ll keep “Channelopathist” as the name of our email newsletter.

These are the terms that led you to our blog in 2011-2014, arranged as a Wordle. Beside the obvious search terms (“epilepsy”, “mutation”), there are some surprising findings that give us an insight on what information you are looking for. For example, we were surprised by the frequency of searches for microdeletion 16p13.11 and SCN2A. [generated with wordle.net]

Top ten. Without further ado, here are the top ten posts of the last two years. There are a few surprises in this list, and we have added a brief comment to each post.

#9 – The expanding spectrum of STXBP1
Pretty much out of nowhere, STXBP1 has emerged as one of the major genes for various forms of epileptic encephalopathies. This is our post on two planets, surgery versus genetics, and the bubble bath analogy.